The silence in the room became heavy, a physical weight pressing down on everyone except Leo and me. Marcus, oblivious to the tectonic shift in the room’s energy, continued to preen. “As I was saying, Leo—may I call you Leo?—Project Aethelgard is my masterpiece. I’ve handled the backend integration myself to ensure total security.”
Leo didn’t sit down. He didn’t even look at the chair Marcus pulled out for him. His eyes remained fixed on me, a slow, predatory grin spreading across his face. “Assistant?” Leo repeated the word, tasting it like a bitter wine. “You’re telling me that this man, sitting in the corner, is your note-taker?”
Marcus chuckled, a nervous, oily sound. “Exactly. He’s a good kid, hardworking, but lacks the… shall we say, ‘executive vision’ required for high-level engineering. Now, regarding the data encryption protocols I developed—”
“Stop,” Leo said. The single word cut through Marcus’s monologue like a blade. Leo turned fully toward me, ignoring the board and the sweating CEO. “David, did you finally finish that recursive neural loop we debated back in senior year? The one you said would solve the latency issues in large-scale logistics?”
The room went cold. The board members exchanged confused glances. Marcus’s face drained of color, his mouth hanging open like a landed fish.
“I did,” I said, standing up and finally pushing my chair back. My voice was steady, the fear replaced by a surge of adrenaline. “I actually had to rewrite the entire kernel because the standard libraries couldn’t handle the throughput. It’s in the version 4.2 update on the secure server—the one Marcus hasn’t actually opened yet.”
Leo laughed, a loud, genuine sound that echoed off the glass walls. He walked past Marcus, not even giving him a glance, and clapped a hand on my shoulder. “I should have known. When I saw the preliminary technical brief for Aethelgard, I told my partners the logic looked familiar. It had your signature all over it. No one else builds architectures that elegant.”
Leo then turned to the board of directors. His expression went from friendly to ice-cold in a heartbeat. “Gentlemen, I’ve known David for a long time. We were roommates at MIT. We shared a thesis. To hear that he is being used as an ‘assistant’ while someone else claims credit for his genius is… disappointing. More importantly, it’s a liability.”
The Chairman of the Board, a grey-haired man who had been watching Marcus with increasing suspicion, spoke up. “Mr. Sterling, are you suggesting the CEO did not develop this technology?”
“I’m suggesting that Marcus Thorne couldn’t explain the difference between a floating point and a swimming pool if his life depended on it,” Leo said sharply. He looked at Marcus. “Marcus, since you ‘personally engineered’ this, why don’t you explain to the board how the polymorphic encryption layer handles a brute-force injection without sacrificing the packet speed? Specifically, the part David and I discussed three minutes ago.”
Marcus stammered. He looked at the slides, then at me, then at the board. “I… it’s a proprietary process… very complex… we use a multi-faceted approach…”
“He has no idea,” I interrupted. I walked to the head of the table and took the remote from Marcus’s trembling hand. “Because I’m the one who wrote the white paper. I’m the one who holds the patent pending for the core algorithm. And I’m the one who has the log files showing Marcus hasn’t accessed the development environment in four months.”
The Chairman stood up. “Marcus, leave the room. Now.”
Marcus tried to speak, but the look on Leo’s face stopped him. He slunk out of the room, his “executive vision” shattered.
After the door clicked shut, the Chairman looked at me, then at Leo. “It seems we have a significant management problem. David, I apologize for the oversight. We’d like to hear the real presentation. And Leo, I assume Vanguard is still interested?”
Leo sat down and winked at me. “I’m only interested if David is the one running the show. I don’t invest in shadows. I invest in the people who build them.”
By the end of the week, Marcus was ousted, his reputation in the industry incinerated. I was appointed as the new CTO with a significant equity stake. Leo and I went out for dinner that night—not for ramen this time, but at the most expensive steakhouse in the city.
“You knew, didn’t you?” I asked him, raising a glass.
“The moment I saw the project name,” Leo replied. “I knew you were behind it. I just didn’t realize I’d get the pleasure of watching that idiot hand me the shovel to bury him with.”
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